France has expelled two radical Islamist leaders in the wake of the London bombings and plans to round up and send home up to two dozen more by the end of the month, the Interior Ministry said this week.
A ministry spokesperson said France had ”no problem” deporting speakers accused of inflaming anti-Western feeling, even if they were French citizens and recognised as preachers by France’s six million-strong Muslim community.
Reda Ameuroud, a 35-year-old Algerian who was staying in France illegally, was deported last Friday, the spokesperson said. His ”violent and hate-filled” speeches at a radical mosque in Paris’s 11th arrondissement prompted the French intelligence services to classify him as an ”ideological reference point”.
He is the brother of Abderahmane Ameuroud, who was sentenced to seven years in prison and banned from French territory in May after being convicted of giving ”logistical support” to two Tunisians who assassinated the Afghan resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massood in 2001.
Another ”part-time” imam, Abdelhamid Aissaoui (41), was expelled from France earlier last week for urging youths to join the jihad, or holy war, the spokesperson said. He had already served a four-year jail term for his role in an attempted 1995 bomb attack on a high-speed TGV train near Lyon, mounted by an Algerian extremist group, the GIA.
The spokesperson said about 1 100 imams have been identified in France and ”the vast majority pose no problem at all”.
According to the ministry, the radical imams and ideologists targeted for expulsion are mainly North African and Turkish. — Â